My buddy Alice Prepare dinner, who has died aged 70, was a psychotherapist, author, feminist and political activist.
Her life’s work involved well being and wellness, particularly for ladies. She was a nurse, a well being customer and managed varied psychological well being tasks in London for a few years. She additionally labored with mentally unwell sufferers and group well being aides in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, in 2010 and 2011, although she turned sceptical of one of these volunteer work and questioned whether or not her abilities and expertise may actually assist in such a special context. She moved to Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 2016 and developed a psychotherapy apply, drawing on her deep data and empathy.
Within the early Eighties, Alice was concerned within the Greenham Widespread ladies’s peace motion. She and I wrote Greenham Girls All over the place (1983), highlighting the worry and anger that led ladies to behave towards the nuclear arms race. Earlier she had began a undertaking about nuclear nightmares, prompted by her personal desires. By magazines akin to Sanity and Spare Rib, she invited others to ship her their very own desires – and included a few of them within the e-book.
Years later, a French translation of the e-book, Des Femmes Contre des Missiles (2016), introduced the Greenham motion to a youthful era, together with the film-maker Sonia Gonzalez, whose English-language documentary for Arte TV, Girls In opposition to the Bomb (2021), options Alice, me, Clare Hudson, Rebecca Johnson, Ann Pettit, and others.
Alice noticed shut parallels between present fears of ecological catastrophe and nightmares of nuclear disaster. As with Greenham, private terror was a spur to public motion for Extinction Riot, which she was concerned with for a time. She felt strongly that the Greenham motion continues to be a strong supply of concepts and beliefs, not simply historical past or nostalgia.
She was fiercely impartial, a passionate feminist and an avid reader. Lately she cherished tending her backyard, which grew wilder the upper it climbed the steep hill behind her home. Sadly, her curiosity about life, her dedication to ladies’s wellbeing, her creativity and writings-in-progress have been all reduce brief by breast most cancers.
Born in Oxford, to Iris (nee Golding), a music instructor, and Morris Prepare dinner, a historical past professor, after leaving college Alice studied for a BA in English at Sussex College, graduating in 1973. In 2002 she was awarded a grasp’s in psychotherapy from the Minster Centre in London.
She is survived by Jacob Prepare dinner, her son from a relationship with Mick Duffield.
